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The Walter Duranty Prize

What’s the Walter Duranty Prize you may ask? Have you heard of the Pulitzer prize? You have? Good. Well the Duranty prize is the opposite of the Pulitzer prize.

We have the Oscars for good films, and the Golden Rasperberries & Rotten Tomatoes for the crap films. So it’s only fair that both good and bad journalism are noted. The Pulitzer prize is for outstanding journalism. The Duranty prize will be for journalistic mendacity.

Why is called the Walter Duranty Prize? Well Walter was journalist who wrote for the New York Times in the 1920s and 1930s. He whitewashed Joseph Stalin’s forced mass starvation of the Ukrainians (the Holodomor). For this and other work he got the Pulitzer prize. Even after the truth was found out, the prize has not been revoked and his photo still remains on the wall of the NYT’s offices. Though the NYT has acknowledged that his articles constituted “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.”

Who is handling the prize? PJ Media along with The New Criterion are the ones organising the competition. They are American media organisations on the right politically and are primarily looking at American journalists, but I think they would be happy to get candidates from all over the world.

Why I have highlighted this tiny inconsequential prize competition? Well it is only just starting out. This will be it’s first year. I heard about it from WUWT where they are nominating Dr Peter Gleick of fakegate fame. But I think Johann Hari should be nominated as he is more deserving of the prize. Gleick only did one bad article, Hari has made a career out of bad journalism.

The first annual Duranty Prize will be given for the most egregious example of dishonest reporting for the fiscal year 2011-2012 (July 1, 2011 – June 30, 2012).

PJ Media will be officially accepting nominations starting May 1, 2012, at Duranty@pjmedia.com (but if you want to go ahead now, no one’s going to stop you – the email address is functioning).

A Duranty Prize Committee of seven journalists and writers will then sift the nominations and decide the winner (or winners) to be announced at a ceremony in New York in the autumn.

The intention of this award is to highlight the continuing extreme bias and misreporting of our media. Nominations are welcome in text and video forms, in print or on the web. The committee would appreciate an Internet link with your nomination.

Since this is a new prize the committee also solicits your suggestions on how we should carry on our work and any other suggestions regarding the Walter Duranty Prize in the comments section of the announcement. You are free to put your nominations in the comments section as well, but in order for them to count, please remember to send them to Duranty@pjmedia.com.

F**k me , its a no brainer . The bbc win it by a mile. I expect the citation to read something along the following lines… ‘For sustained, expertly co-ordinated team work across the disciplines of MMGW, promotion of a European socialist agenda, Obamamasia worship and subtle and sustained denigration of ‘right wing’ ideals and achievements.’

I was going to suggest George Monbiot, but I’m not sure that the prize should go to a deluded idiot who actually believes the drivel he writes; it should perhaps be reserved for someone genuinely mendacious.

I’m inclined to agree with Backwoodsman in regard to the BBC. They’ve been systematically purging their journalistic, editorial, managerial and presentational staff of anybody not toeing the corporate left-wing line for years, and even openly admit it. However, they are so deluded that they will probably regard Duranty as a hero, and accept the award as an accolade, so it may be best to bypass them.

Hari does seem the obvious candidate. He should be ridiculed and punished, pour encourage les autres.

What’s required is a series of awards for bad journalism which cover a full range of categories.

The Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass Award can be given to the journo with the most egregious reputation for plagiarism and for fabricating other people’s work. This year’s winner will be Johann Hari.

The Walter Duranty Award gets given to the journo who has (like the man himself) an established record of writing apologias for barbaric dictatorships. Nominees for this year include Seumas Milne, Simon Tisdall and Jonathan Steele.

The Beatrix Campbell Award gets given to the worst case of scaremongering in journalism, in which horror stories about child abuse/MMR/hydraulic fracturing etc are concocted on the basis of rumours, dodgy science or just plain bullshit. There’d be quite a few nominees from the Daily Mail and the Graun.

The Helen Thomas Award gets given to the individual, paper or channel with the most insidious reputation for all-round bigotry, in particular with its skewed reporting directed against any racial/ethnic group, or attacks based on hostility towards religion, gender and sexuality. The Daily Star and the Guardian can be nominated because of their incitement of hatred against Muslims and Jews respectively. Press TV could also be nominated.

The Walter Mitty Award is a lifetime one gets given to the journo whose output combines breast-beating polemics with blatant self-promotion. John Pilger and Robert Fisk can be nominated (although Fisk could get a Blair/Glass in his own right).